


Losing Ground

by atimi (bertee)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Case Fic, Delusions, Dreams, Evil Sam Winchester, Flashback, M/M, Possession, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-05
Updated: 2009-09-05
Packaged: 2017-10-27 22:28:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/300723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bertee/pseuds/atimi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean starts to have nightmares in the aftermath of Lucifer's reappearance on Earth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Losing Ground

**Author's Note:**

> This was written in thirty short chapters at the pace of one a day but they have all been condensed here into one, with the chapter divisions preserved. First posted [here](http://bertee.livejournal.com/18293.html).

Even after the fires of the Pit, Dean still dreams of water.

He's ten years old and listening to his Dad's screams slap sharply off the surface of the water, pain winding through the leaves and the reeds with every breeze.

Somewhere deep inside, he knows that the Fossegrim has only broken four of his father's fingers and that John Winchester will live through much more serious injuries in his lifetime, but to his sleep-regressed mind, it's always the sound of his father dying alone in a Florida swamp while his oldest son stands there uselessly, too scared to do anything other than keep breathing.

He's scared to go back to the car while his Dad's out there suffering.

He's scared to take another step while Sammy's clinging to his hand and crying in loud, hiccupping sobs.

But most of all, he's scared to stay still.

The trees twist together above his head, blotting out parts of the sky and letting the moonlight form shadows across the marshes to give bad things more places to hide. The stars shine up at him; they glint on the ground like jewels for the taking and don't tell the watcher whether they're resting on two inches or twenty feet of water. Dean's shivering in his t-shirt even as his skin feels clammy with heat and he hugs Sammy closer, wishing his Dad was there just so he could whisper his name with the same pleading regularity that Sam's crying Dean's own name.

He clutches at Sam's hand and peers into the darkness, blinking away tears to try to focus on the shape he sees down in the leaves.

His breath catches and his tears come hot and fast when the scaly form moves forward out of the shadows.

For months after they leave Florida, Dean wakes with a shout of panic, hands scrambling over their shared mattress to reassure himself that all of Sam's limbs are still attached and that his heart is still beating under Dean's palm.

But he grows up, Sam grows up, and the dreams change.

Sometimes Dad is quiet. Instead of the groans, shouts and splashes which Dean recalls with ease when the sun is up, he hears nothing at night, just a cut-off yell and the heavy, wet sound of a body falling amid the reeds.

Sometimes Sam is gone. Dean spins around, lost and alone in the ever-expanding swamp as he screams for his brother but gets bloated silence in return.

And then sometimes Sam isn't gone. Dean follows the squelches and cracks with sick terror twisting up inside him, to find Sam sitting in a patch of moonlight and smiling up at him. His favorite jeans and the t-shirt the ten-year-old Dean helped him pick out that morning are splattered with blood.

Dean wants to run forward to stop the bleeding and to save Sam but something holds him still. He watches, wide-eyed and terrified, as Sammy digs his little hands in the pile in front of his crossed legs and turns to offer the handfuls of bloodied flesh to the beast beside him. Its eyes flash in the dull moonlight, smooth and black like beetles hiding in the cracks of a log, but it opens its jaws to Sam.

Sam drops the flesh inside and claps in delight when the creature chews.

Dean can never take his eyes off Sammy's little red hands.

+++

It was morning before they even thought to stop running.

Maryland and Virginia had receded into nothingness in the Impala's rearview mirror by the time the sunlight began to light up the mountains of West Virginia.

They'd traveled this route before, six-year-old Sammy staring wide-eyed out of the windows and insisting that every shadow among the trees was a black bear or a bobcat or a coyote or whatever other animal his imagination could conjure up while Dean sat up front with their father, listening to his briefings on wendigoes and tree spirits with the same rapt attention Sammy still had for fairytales.

Back then, Dean's attention was only on the man beside him. Twenty years later, not much had changed.

The scenery passed in a blur as Dean's eyes moved in the same triangle from the road stretching ahead, to the odometer notching up the number of miles between them and the Ilchester convent, to his silent brother in the seat next to him.

They'd tried talking a few hundred miles back. Some issues had been cleared up, some had been avoided, and they'd established compromises as well as points of further disagreement before yielding again to the silence which had become so easy over the past ten months.

The Ohio state line was less than half a mile behind them when Sam spoke up for the first time in hours.

"We should stop."

Dean glanced over at him but Sam spoke honestly, "Dean, you've been driving all night and we don't even know if Lu-" He swallowed, the name and its implications too big to deal with in the tense confines of the Impala. "-if anything's coming after us," he corrected quietly. "We should rest for a while, get some sleep, work out what our next move is."

Dean was too tired to protest, his body feeling heavier at the mere mention of sleep, and he swung the car off the road at the nearest dirt track. The Impala juddered over the uneven ground and Dean pulled her behind a thicket a little way up on the hillside, killing the engine and reducing the number of participants in their conversation from three to two.

They sat for a long moment, watching the trees and the sunlight and everything that was still on the table to be won.

Dean's eyes itched from exhaustion, his hands and ankles were cramping from their position during the drive, and the knife-edge of the silence was slowly stripping the skin off his body.

"We're alive."

His voice was rough from disuse and when he looked over to see Sam frowning at him, he repeated, louder and clearer, "We're alive. Lucifer," -Sam flinched at the name- "the apocalypse, all the shit that's coming our way; they're all just bridges we're gonna have to cross, right?"

"I guess, but-"

"So we'll cross 'em." The facade hurt to put up but it went up all the same. "We're still alive, the world's still here, and until either of those two things stops being true, we'll keep fighting." He shifted on the seat, feeling his shoulders protest the movement but inwardly relieved when Sam leaned into him in return. "We'll work out what to do next when we've had some sleep."

He closed the gap between them, letting his eyes fall shut as the stubble on Sam's cheek scraped across his palm, and forced himself to press a kiss to Sam's forehead rather than his parted lips. The contact was barely more than brotherly, reassurance rather than intimacy, but it had the desired effect when Dean pulled back to see a little less worry in Sam's eyes.

Satisfied, he slid out of the front seat with one final pat to Sam's shoulder and moved to settle in the back of the Impala, mind and body somewhere beyond exhausted.

Hearing Sam fold himself up onto the front seat, Dean closed his eyes and tried not to think of how his brother's skin still tasted of sulfur.

 **+++**

For three days after Lucifer rose, the world was peaceful.

There were no disasters, natural or unnatural. Cattle remained unmutilated, lightning storms were few and far between, and when it rained, the streets were filled with water instead of blood. If Dean hadn't been there himself, hadn't seen the light and heard the screeches of Hell being shaken to its foundations and let loose upon the world, for those three days, he might have believed the apocalypse had been averted rather than triggered.

Unfortunately, there was a reason optimism was a rare trait among hunters.

They realized that the peace had been no more than Lucifer inhaling when they encountered the first whisper of his breath in a small village on the shores of Lake Erie.

A sign on the roadside informed them that Lakeline, Ohio had a population of 165; the names on the graves in the churchyard told them that the same families had owned the land for generations; and the stalls set up in a forest clearing for the village fair indicated that Lakeline had been home to a close-knit community.

It was this close-knit community that Sam and Dean found massacred.

They left the Impala at the roadside where they found the first body part - a woman's arm wearing a bloodied silver bracelet - and followed the trail of human breadcrumbs.

Weapons bag slung over his shoulder and shotgun in his hand, Dean kept pace with Sam as they moved through the trees, both braced for an ambush and listening for any sound that wasn’t made by the twigs under their boots. The woods were quiet in the afternoon sun and they pressed on at a steady speed, noting the body parts flung into the branches but not stopping to examine them closely anymore.

Dean only noticed Sam had moved ahead of him when he stopped suddenly, staring forward at something Dean couldn't see and murmuring a warning, "Dean..."

Dean's thumb went to the safety of his gun and he stepped up next to Sam, following the path of his gaze and swallowing hard when he caught sight of the clearing ahead.

Some of the bodies were no longer recognizable as human, reduced to bloody smears in the grass or strings of entrails hanging from the trees. The others, the ones which were still mostly in one piece, looked like the broken dolls of careless children, staring sightlessly at Sam and Dean as they approached, some missing an eye or a jaw or a scalp, and some twisted beyond natural limits by experimental hands.

Struggling to take it all in, Dean's mind shifted back to self-defense when three of the victims arched their already-broken backs, mouths lolling open to let a coil of black smoke rush inside.

The weapons bag fell to the forest floor and Sam clicked off the Colt’s safety, but Dean found himself flying backwards through the air before he could grab the knife from its sheath.

He groaned in pain as his back impacted with the trunk of a tree, the familiar but unwelcome weight of power pinning his limbs in place and forcing the air from his lungs. He blinked to clear his blurred vision and gritted his teeth when he saw Sam being held down on a fallen log by the same invisible force while the demon in the body of a stocky, middle-aged man grinned down at him with toothless, bleeding gums.

"Well, if it isn't the great Sam Winchester." He chuckled. "I'm honored."

Dean watched as blood sprayed over Sam's cheeks but was relieved that none of it made it into Sam's mouth as his brother spat back, "Wish I could say the same."

"Aw, don't be like that, Sam," another demon simpered, cracking the fingers of its elderly female host back into place. "We're so grateful to you, you know."

"You set Him free," the first chimed in, reverence in his voice. "You gave Him back to us as our savior and we thank you for it."

"We worship you for it." The old woman's thin lips curved up in a joyful smile and Dean watched Sam's eyes flicker between the two of them. "These sacrifices are for you as well as for Him, Sam."

"They are a gift," the man agreed. "Take them, Sam. Join us."

The woman raised her hand to stroke Sam's face. "We'll take better care of you than your brother ever could."

"Get off him!" Dean fought against the crushing hold and glared back at the male demon who sneered in his direction. "Get your hands off my brother, you son of a bitch, or I swear, I'll-"

"You'll what, Dean?"

He jumped at the voice from beside him and looked down at a blond boy of no more than ten, his throat gaping and his eyes black as he spoke, "Sammy should be with us now. He belongs with us."

"Sam-"

Dean's shout was muffled as a tree branch wrapped itself around his mouth. Wide-eyed, he looked down to see the boy leaning beside him, smoke trickling slowly out of his mouth and into the tree as he asked with mocking curiosity, "Did you ever watch Evil Dead, Dean?"

It took a second for Dean to process the implications of the question but when it hit, it hit hard. He yelled against the branch covering his mouth but the demon just laughed, smoke billowing out with every guffaw. The boy's body dropped like a discarded marionette and the demon soaked into the tree as Dean struggled in vain, the hilt of the knife infuriatingly out of reach.

The branches shifted around him, two lifting to press across his hips and thighs and one curling purposefully around his throat.

Dean shouted again, the bark scraping his lips and splinters prickling his jaw as he was kept quiet by the demon. The branch around his neck felt like an arm, its hold heavy and constricting, and Dean clenched his fists in an effort to get free. He guessed the demon wanted to see him struggle since the pressure on his left arm loosened a moment later, enabling him to clutch ineffectually at the limb which choked him.

The rustle of the leaves sounded like laughter and the thinner branches slithered over his body, keeping in place and keeping him struggling for air and freedom.

Dragging in a breath through his nose, Dean looked over to see that Sam was pinned and surrounded but physically unharmed as the demons continued to whisper to him.

He acted before he could second-guess himself. Letting go of the branch pressing on his windpipe, he dropped his hand to the sheath on his right hip, grabbing the knife at an awkward angle and stabbing it as hard as he could into the wood of the tree.

It was like being electrocuted. The tree lit up with the death-spasms of the entity inside it and Dean's body felt like it was encased in embers as the air filled with the phantom smell of burning wood.

He heard shouts and shots from across the clearing and knew Sam had been released from his bonds at the same time as Dean's own became intangible as well as invisible.

Sam sat up and Dean watched the old woman's body crumple to the ground as a bullet took out the demon inside her.

It took him a long minute to hack free of the binding branches and his jaw stung from the splinters when he finally stumbled away from the tree and towards his brother, expecting to see another corpse and a healthy Sam.

However, when he crossed the log in a clumsy hurdle, it was to the sound of yet another gunshot.

His instinctive worry disappeared when he saw that Sam was crouched, alive, but he frowned when Sam lifted his hand from the mouth of the middle-aged man.

"Sammy? You good?"

His frown deepened when Sam jumped at the question but his expression was back to neutral by the time Sam stood and turned to him.

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm okay." He lowered the Colt with a grim smile and Dean saw the sluggishly bleeding hole in the man's forehead. "We should get out of here before we call this in."

He stepped over the body and the log, leaving Dean staring at the corpse and trying to remember whether the bullet wounds in his knees and hips had been there before Sam started shooting.

 **+++**

"You still haven't seen him?"

"Castiel?" On the other end of the phone, Chuck sighed and offered an apologetic answer, "Sorry, Dean, I've not heard anything from him. Not since he was yanked back upstairs like a heavenly yo-yo anyway."

"Have you-"

"Tried calling him? Yes."

"Well, what about-"

"The other angels? They aren't saying much."

"Would you-"

"I'm stopping," Chuck said quickly. "Sorry. Force of habit; you usually do all your talking in my head so-"

"Chuck," Dean interrupted, "can you focus, man?"

"I'm focused, I'm focused," Chuck reassured. "What can I do for you?"

Leaning against the Impala, Dean stared up at the rusted sign on the gas station and forced as much nonchalance into his voice as he could, "Me and Sammy are wondering if you've got any information to share with us. Maybe something about the apocalypse which is happening, oh, right now?"

Chuck let out a nervous laugh. "The world hasn't ended yet?"

"Really. Because I never would've noticed," Dean shot back, his sarcasm sharper than he intended. He rubbed the engine oil from his fingers onto his jeans in a messy smear and ground the heel of his hand against his eye until his annoyance passed. An apology felt like wasted breath and he settled for asking again, calmer this time, "So you don't know anything about where Lucifer is, or what his plans are?"

"I'm writing the Winchester Gospel. I don't exactly get the playbook for the other team."

"So give me a heads-up on our plays," Dean said, exasperated. "C'mon, man, at least tell me if we're headed towards the right end of the field here."

"The field?"

"The country," he corrected. "We're up in Michigan right now dealing with a Black Dog - should we head South next, or West, or what? Where do we wind up meeting Lucifer?"

It was Chuck's turn to sound exasperated. "I don't know, okay? I've not seen that far yet, and even if I had, I'm pretty much being censored here."

Dean frowned, dropping his gaze from the sign and shifting position on the Impala. "Censored?"

Chuck was evidently grateful for the opportunity to vent as he complained, "By the angel branch of the FCC. That angel Zachariah? He watches me all day, man. I go out to get some groceries and he's in the car next to me. I wake up at night and he's sitting there watching me sleep. Hell, even when I take a sh-"

"Okay!" Dean cut in, not wanting to complete that mental image. "I get it, he's following you."

"Following me?" Chuck's laugh was pained. "He's freakin' living with me, man. He uses my shower..."

Dean raised his eyebrows. "I did not know angels showered."

Chuck made a noise which usually accompanied a shudder. "Neither did I until last Wednesday. That was not a fun way to start my morning."

It was a small point but Dean's brain somehow couldn't let it go. "Angels shower? How does he even get dirty?"

Chuck let out a shaky breath. "Decoupage."

Suddenly grateful for Castiel's minor-league level of stalking, Dean brought his mind back on topic and, after checking the corner of the building to ensure Sam hadn't come back yet, asked hopefully, "So you've got nothing for me? Nothing about Cas or Lucifer or me and Sam?"

If he'd placed a little extra emphasis on the last name in that list, he wasn't about to admit to it. Still, he listened intently as Chuck gave another quiet sigh and spoke so softly that Dean had to strain to hear, "Dean, listen to me, Sam's-"

He was cut off by the loud and pointed sound of a throat being cleared on his end of the line, and Dean guessed it was Zachariah's less than subtle method of censorship. When Chuck spoke again, it was to give a more business-like update of, "I've not heard anything about Castiel or Lucifer but I'll call if there's anything I'm allowed to tell you." He relaxed a little with his parting words, "You two should get back on the road. Sam should be back from the bathroom any minute."

He hung up, leaving Dean with a silent cell phone against his ear as he looked up to see Sam, who rounded the Impala with a smile and the easy question, "Who were you calling?"

Dean shrugged and reached for his own door handle. "Traffic report."

 **+++**

Dean dreams of fire.

He's seven years old and in southern Louisiana. Daddy's standing next to him, Sammy perched on his hip and Dean's hand wrapped in his own, and Dean's looking out at the sea for the first time in his life.

He's seen drawings of it in picture books and cartoons, bright blue waves housing smiling jellyfish and beautiful mermaids with hair almost as pretty as Mommy's was, and he's heard about it in some of the books he's been reading aloud for Sammy, but he's never seen it in real life. Not until now.

It's big.

Dean always thought his father was big - Daddy is tall and strong and a superhero - but this, this huge expanse of water in front of him, is something bigger than big and Dean struggles to take in the new scale of the world.

Deep down, he knows how big the world really is. He's been to Hell and back, had his worldly limits redefined again and again in breathtakingly painful ways, but the sights that greet him in his dreams always leave him facing that same sense of incomprehensible enormity.

He recalls the few hours they spend at the water's edge. He knows the taste of saltwater and the smell of waves sloshing over the rocks and the sound of Sammy's delighted giggles when Daddy dangles him low enough to dip his bare feet in the surf. He remembers sitting on the rocks, waiting for his own feet to dry and watching the tide lap at the shore like the tongue of some great monster called Sea.

At some point in his dreams, his memories slip sideways.

Soon, the rocks and sand left behind by the waves are dark with charring, not moisture. The lapping waves become licking flames; the white foam becomes orange fire; and the primal roar of the elements stays constant.

The sky is glowing above them, painted by the blanket of yellows and reds and oranges that it now looks down on. The flames come in bursts, advancing and receding, rising and falling, in an hypnotic rhythm that Dean can't tear his eyes away from. There's no smoke - his eyes don't sting like they did when Mommy was burning - and now that he can see the fire, he wonders if it's wrong to find it beautiful.

He blinks and focuses and smiles at the silhouette of Daddy and Sammy in the middle of the blaze. The flames are eating at Daddy's legs where he has his pant-legs rolled up to his knees but he's still laughing and still dangling Sam into the fire and Dean doesn't want to interrupt when they both sound so happy.

He watches Sammy kick happily as Daddy swings him through the flames, sparks flying off his toes when he's lifted back into the air again. The fire burns higher and hotter, swirling up to Daddy's waist and striping over his clothes with greedy fingers but not touching his joyful little brother.

His legs sting and Dean looks down to find his skin red where it had been wet, painful blisters where there had been drops of water.

Worried, he looks up again to shout for his father, a warning rather than a complaint, but falls silent when John's silhouette disintegrates before his eyes, crumbling to ash to be consumed by the hungry flames.

Dean's gaze darts to Sammy, hands braced on the rocks to launch himself forward in a rescue mission that is soon proven to be unnecessary. Sammy's outline is gone from view but before Dean can look among the ripples for the three year old, he sees another, taller form, long and lean against the surrounding inferno.

Familiarity tugs at Dean's heart and mind when the newcomer turns to him, his face in shadow but a single flame dancing and flickering in the palm of the hand he holds out to Dean.

Dean doesn't stop to think about it as he rises to his burned feet, doesn't notice the pain while he crosses the rocks to reach the fire's edge, and doesn't pay attention to the whispering agony of the flames when he walks towards his brother.

Sam smiles at him, touches him, breathes a kiss across his lips, and Dean falls away into ashes.

 **+++**

"Uh-huh. Was that in Hixson?"

Studying the map that lay over the trunk of the Impala, Dean penciled a small cross over the town of Hixson, Tennessee at Sam's nod and glanced over at the notes in his journal.

"Kimmins too?" Sam was quiet as he held the cell phone to his ear and Dean had his pencil poised over Kimmins, waiting for Bobby's answer. "Yeah, crop failure. Got it. Were there any more in Tennessee or-"

Dean started to shift his hand down even before Sam repeated Bobby's words for his benefit, "Down to Alabama. Pike Road and-"

"Littleville," Dean muttered, adding another cross as Sam glanced his way before turning his attention back to Bobby.

"So far we've covered every place you've mentioned, Bobby," Sam said. "They were all low-level demons; there's been no sign of Lucifer anywhere."

Dean had to agree. After leaving Michigan, they'd zigzagged their way down the country, taking out as many demons as they could but still not finding the boss. Now they'd hit the Gulf Coast and, out of southerly options, were heading west on the basis that Lucifer would rather hang out in California than Florida, if only for the opportunity to off Tom Cruise.

Despite the forced cheerfulness he and Sam had tried to maintain during routine hunt after routine hunt, Dean had to admit that after all the white lights and surround sound, he'd expected a bigger entrance from the Devil himself; while he might have been initially relieved not to be thrown into a fight to the death, he was starting to get nervous about the Satanic no show.

Unfortunately, Bobby's weekly update on Demonic Signs in the US of A wasn't proving to be too helpful in that respect. The list of towns, dates, and omens he'd rattled off had all been towns that Dean and Sam had visited already and 'Been there, killed that' was quickly becoming a tired response.

With a yawn, he tapped his pencil on the map and wrinkled his nose at the teeth marks in the wood as he listened to Sam end the call.

"Thanks, Bobby. Let us know if you hear anything else."

He dropped the phone back in his pocket and Dean's eyes shifted up from Sam's jacket to his face before he asked, "Bobby not heard anything either?"

"Nothing except the towns he gave us. Any of them not match up?" he inquired with a hopefulness that Dean felt bad about squashing.

He squashed it anyway. "Nope. Every single town he mentioned has already been given a demonic spring clean."

Sam sighed, moving to fold the map away while suggesting, "Maybe there was something else. Maybe it's Lucifer causing all these signs and he's just moving a step ahead of us."

"And what, he just happens to go to towns where there are other demons for us to kill while we're there?" Dean shrugged his jacket off his shoulders and tossed it across the backseat before flicking through the journal again with a shake of his head. "I don't know, man; it seems kinda snitchy for the ruler of Hell. Shouldn't he be wanting to help out his demon pals instead of flashing lighting over their heads until we get there to take them out?"

He watched for Sam's reaction and was a little relieved to see Sam's shoulders slump in dejection.

"So, what now?" Sam asked with a touch of resignation. "We head west?"

"We head west," Dean affirmed, dropping his gaze to continue double-checking the information Bobby gave them against their route down from Michigan. "It's Texas time, Sammy."

"Great." Sam sounded less than enthused and Dean just 'hmm'ed in response when he added, "Guess I'll go get some more coffee for the road."

Sam's boots crunched over the gravel at the edge of the gas station forecourt as he walked away but Dean didn't look up, staring instead at the scrawled information about Littleville, Alabama. With the unexplained temperature fluctuations, the storms, and the increased insect activity, the town had plenty of signs that a powerful demon was in the area when Sam and Dean were there two weeks earlier.

Dean scanned the hunt report again and swallowed hard.

In Littleville, Alabama, the only thing they'd been hunting was a werewolf.

 **+++**

The wood cracked under the force of Dean's kick and a shrill cry rose up into the silence of the night.

Presidio, Texas had been quiet enough but as Sam and Dean had driven out along the sweep of the river in search of the Tlahuelpuchi nest, there had seemed to be nothing out there but them and the coyotes.

That all changed when the door to the shack fell inward with a clatter, filling the air with the irate shrieks of the Tlahuelpuchi and with the screams of the scared children they'd taken for their monthly feast.

The sole male creature fell quickly, consecrated iron rounds blasted into his chest from the barrels of two guns as Sam and Dean fired together with an ease that came from a lifetime of practice. Tall and broad, the male went down with a heavy thump, and both the shrieking and the screaming increased as they stepped over his corpse, guns held high.

The Tlahuelpuchi operated a lot like vampires, draining the blood of their preferably young victims to sustain themselves, but as far as Dean was concerned, the fact that they could be killed by metal bullets put them way ahead of vampires in the 'Things I'd Like To Hunt' ranks.

However, as he was thrown into a wall by one of the three female Tlahuelpuchi who then bent his gun in half and tossed it away, he was reminded that there was no such thing as a creature he'd like to hunt.

Struggling to pull himself to his feet, he saw one of the others crumple to the floor after taking a bullet to the heart from Sam's still functioning gun and noted with relief that Sam was faring well as he went after the third.

The children were still crying as the first Tlahuelpuchi reached down to grab Dean's throat and pin him up against the wall with inhuman strength.

He shuddered as she pushed her nose against his neck, inhaling deeply and licking curiously at the skin as Dean spat with as much breath as he had, "Hey, down, Fido. M'not your fucking chew-toy."

Apparently lack of speech was another way Tlahuelpuchi differed from vampires and Dean winced when he received an elbow to his face for his backtalk.

His eyes were drawn to her mouth as she smiled, looking like an ordinary woman in every way except for the gaping slash which stretched from ear to ear. It was filled with teeth and blood, sharp white points smeared with crimson, and Dean fought to get his hand up to her cheek to keep her jaws away from his neck, hoping the blood came from the animal carcasses they'd found around the shack rather than from the kids.

There was more shouting, his own mixed with the children's mixed with what he hoped was the death scream of the third creature rather than his brother, and Dean's arms trembled with the strain of holding back the hungry mouth as he opened his own to yell, "Sam!"

He wasn't sure whether he was more grateful or surprised that Sam was there before he'd even finished shouting but gratitude won out when Sam hooked his arm around the Tlahuelpuchi's neck from behind, keeping himself safe from her bite, and yanked her backwards.

Dean searched quickly for a metal weapon of some kind but changed course when Sam backed away from the creature and raised his gun with the shout, "Get the kids!"

Dean couldn't blame the three children for crying louder at his approach but he didn't have time to waste convincing under-fives that he was one of the good guys. Hoping they'd figure it out by the fact that he and Sam didn't look like they wanted to eat them, he scooped up the baby from the lap of the older girl and shepherded the other two towards the door with his spare hand and the coaxing words, "C'mon, it's okay; you're safe now. You guys come out here and you'll be safe."

The comforting promises kept spilling out until they'd made it out of the shack. Unwilling to go far without his brother, Dean rocked the crying baby as well as he could manage while he peered back in through the window at Sam, who was evidently having no trouble taking out his third Tlahuelpuchi of the night.

Watching his brother duck a punch, deliver a kick, and then raise his gun to fire two rounds into the creature's chest, Dean had to admit that he was impressed by how much Sam's hand-to-hand combat had improved in the weeks they'd spent dealing with the fallout of the alleged apocalypse.

Watching Sam glance down at the body before turning to leave, he was less reassured by the dark smirk that flickered across his brother's face.

 **+++**

There were only so many times Dean could shout Castiel's name before his voice gave up in protest.

He didn't know what was more frustrating: his voice being croaky and hoarse, Castiel not answering after hours of yelling, or Dean himself being desperate enough to call on the angel in the first place.

It had been nearly two months now and there had still been no sign of Lucifer other than the white light and the gradual increase of supernatural occurrences around the country. Dean, Sam, and the rest of the hunters had yet to locate either the epicenter of the problems or Lucifer himself, and the continued absence of the angels was becoming worrying.

Dean needed answers, explanations, and a focus for their attack; if questions were also raised about Sam's recent behavioral changes, that would just be a useful coincidence.

"Castiel!"

His throat was dry and aching and he sank to a seat on the bed, not expecting an answer as he called, "Cas, you son of a bitch, would you get down here already? I need some help with this, man." Tired, he scrubbed a hand over his face and muttered, "Hell, I need a goddamn Idiot's Guide to the Apocalypse."

He looked up at the same cracked ceiling paint he'd been staring at for hours, grateful that the motel was relatively empty as he shouted again, "I don't know what you guys want me to do here. However I'm supposed to stop Lucifer, I'm not exactly doing it by running round the country on a fucking goose chase."

He was on his feet again, pacing as the anger rose. "You not going to give me some pointers at least? Is anybody listening to me right now? Cas? Chuck? I'll even take fucking Zachariah if someone will tell me what the hell you dicks want from me!"

"Fewer complaints would be nice."

The voice from behind him was cold and Dean's spark of hope that Castiel had finally shown up was snuffed out when he turned to see Zachariah standing at the foot of the bed.

His lip curled in a sneer and he couldn't resist the jibe, "You finally leave Chuck alone for ten minutes or is one of your buddies still screening his mail?"

Zachariah smiled. "It's a precautionary measure. We don't want to spoil the ending for you."

Dean raised his eyebrows in disbelief. "Spoil the ending? What, by giving us some clue how to stop the fucking Devil?"

"You'll be told what you need to know when we need you to know it," Zachariah responded calmly. "You're not Pavlov in this situation, Dean; you're the dog."

Dean's fist clenched. Knowing that throwing a punch would bring an instant end to the conversation, he breathed out slowly and asked with as much composure as he could muster, "Where's Cas?"

"Castiel cannot take your calls at the moment," Zachariah intoned with a smirk. "Leave a message and he'll get back to you once Heaven has finished with him."

"Son of a b-"

"Ah, ah," Zachariah scolded. "That's no way to talk to your superior, Dean."

Dean's jaw clenched and he spoke through gritted teeth, "Hate to break it to you, Princess, but you're not my superior; I'm not taking any orders from you."

Zachariah remained infuriatingly unruffled. "So you don't want to know what's happening to your brother? That's fine, I'll just-"

"Wait," Dean interrupted, the mention of Sam setting off all the protective triggers built into him since childhood. "What do you know about Sam?"

Zachariah's eyes flashed with mirth but his expression stayed confidently smug. "Show me some due respect and I'll tell you. A 'please' would be a good start."

It hurt to force the word out but Dean's pride, like Dean's everything else, was secondary to Sam's safety. "Please," he ground out, "tell me what's happening to him."

Zachariah's smile grew even broader. "His nature, Dean. He's not possessed, he's not under any kind of spell. The Sam you're seeing now is what his blood's been leading him towards ever since Azazel visited his crib all those years ago." He took a step closer, smile fading to leave a somber expression on his face. "You should remember your father's advice, Dean. Sam's only going to get worse."

He was gone before Dean could form a response.

 **+++**

Dean dreams of angels.

They're watching over him, just like his mother always said they were. They stand around his bed, Anna to his right, Zachariah to his left, and Uriel completing the group, childhood protectors disguised with familiar faces. There's light behind them, bright and blinding, and Dean can't make out their faces as they whisper a mixture of blessings and prayers over his prone body.

There's a noise from somewhere outside the bed and its angelic walls but he can't see the source, can't see anything other than the silhouetted figures chanting around him. He's held down, the same force wielded by demons now pressing on him like a heavenly hand, and he can do nothing but watch the angels watching over him.

Zachariah falls first.

It was one of John Winchester's lessons, learned the hard way, as everything was with John, on a hunt in Georgia: you take out the most powerful one as soon as you can. A centuries-old vampire had taken a chunk out of Dean's thigh for forgetting that rule and opting to attack a weaker creature first, but whoever is attacking now knows better than Dean did.

The blade goes through Zachariah's throat and Dean watches, immobilized but wide-eyed, at the white glow which pours from his mouth and eyes. His killer shifts the blade again and the light is extinguished as Zachariah's head drops off and to the side. It hits the floor with a dull thud and his body follows a moment later, slumping forward onto the bed and letting a sluggish river of blood flow down Dean's arm, soaking into the bedsheets and making his fingers warm and wet.

Uriel is next, the same flash-thud-slump, as Dean sucks in a terrified breath. His bare feet rest in a sticky puddle of blood and he still can't see the attacker as they move around, hidden by the light, to decapitate Anna with a smooth stroke.

Dean tries to shout, tries to plead with the one swinging the blade, but his mouth won't move. He can do nothing but lay there, bathed in white light and sweat as the blood of the watching angels clings to his skin, thick and heavy as a blanket.

There are footsteps and a figure moves forward out of the light, the silver of the blade gleaming in his hand.

Castiel steps closer.

His clothes are clean of blood even as drops of crimson roll off his raised blade to fall on Dean's forehead.

Castiel's face is blank as the blade hovers over Dean's neck like a guillotine.

Unable to even part his lips to whimper, Dean stares pleadingly into Castiel's cold eyes, hoping for some of the help, mercy or compassion he'd come to respect in the angel.

Even with their history, he feels relief when Castiel's eyes glow white.

It's a more dignified death than the others; once the angelic spark goes out, he sinks to the floor and is spared any further mutilation in death.

Sam steps over his corpse, suited and booted but with no weapons in his hands.

He smiles down at Dean, fond and affectionate, and Dean finds any cries are caught in his throat as Sam murmurs, "It's okay, Dean. You don't need them."

He cups Dean's bloodied face and kisses his forehead.

"You've got me."

 **+++**

They'd just left Kansas when the backlash started.

Emerging from the small patch of woodland where they'd stopped for a bathroom break, Dean had his gun raised and aimed as soon as he saw Sam on his knees with a pistol pointed at his head.

Prepared to deal with a cop, a carjacker, a demon, or almost anything else in between, he nevertheless faltered when the gunman looked up at him with nervous determination.

"Jake?" Dean's strides forward slowed as he stared at the young hunter.

He and Sam had encountered two other sets of hunters while they were dealing with a demon-led coven back in Topeka; Jake and Mike, and Stan and Rob were father/son duos, and while Dean and Sam never worked with a team for long, they'd had each other's backs during the siege on the witches.

That former camaraderie was reduced to nothing the second Jake had pulled his gun on Sam.

"Put down the gun," Dean instructed, watching the young man flinch as he approached. "I don't know what the hell you think you're doing but pointing that at my brother is not the way to do it."

"It needs to be done," Jake said shakily. "He needs to die."

Anger flared up in Dean's stomach but he held it down long enough to come to his senses and to scan the roadside for the Wilkes' car and for Jake's father, who was undoubtedly behind the ambush.

This time the element of surprise was Dean's. Catching Mike creeping out of the trees with a rifle in his hands, he swung around to train his own weapon on him instead, barking out the order, "Drop the gun, man. Don't make me shoot you."

Mike's eyes were wide as he approached, gaze darting between Dean's gun and the kneeling Sam, as he shook his head and moved closer to Dean. "Can't do it, kid. Can't let that monster live."

Dean's lips tightened and he forced a cold smile. "Don't be calling my brother a monster, Mike. Not when I'm a faster shot than you. Drop it."

Mike's steps were wobbly and Dean adjusted his grip on the gun, uncertainty increasing at the sight of the bright fervor in the man's eyes.

"A demon told us what he did," Mike mumbled, glaring at Sam but looking imploringly at Dean. "One of those fuckin' hell-beasts told us what you didn't."

"What did it tell you?" Dean tried for nonchalance but shifted his stance as Mike got closer. "That yellow's not really your color?"

The lame joke had no effect and the barrel of Mike's rifle swung over to Sam as he spoke, "It said he brought on the apocalypse. It said he released that son of a bitch from Hell and he never paid the price for it!"

The gunshot was loud as it sounded out along the empty road.

The sound of a body slumping into the dirt was even louder.

 **+++**

The bullet buried itself in the dirt and Dean slammed the butt of his gun against Mike Wilkes' temple a second time.

Wilkes' rifle had clattered to the ground, knocked from his hands by Dean's panicked lunge towards him, and Mike himself now lay passed out beside his weapon, blood trickling sluggishly down his face and into his hair.

Fired by the brief burst of action, Dean raised his gun again and turned back to where Wilkes' son had Sam on his knees next to the Impala, a pistol trained on his head and a terrified look in his eyes.

Sam glanced up at Dean, shaking his head to warn Dean against what would have been a last resort for him anyway.

Forcing himself to calm down, Dean lifted his finger from the trigger and raised his hands in the air in pacifying surrender, edging closer to Jake as he said, "You don't need to do this, man."

Jake's hand was shaking as he looked between Dean and Sam. "No," he murmured, lacking any kind of conviction. "No, I need to. He ended the world! He needs to die."

"Does the world look like it's ending?" Dean gestured to the surrounding trees and the scenic plains stretching out into the distance. "It's not over yet. We can stop this but you need to put down the gun first."

"No." The same kind of resolution that was in his father's eyes now crept into Jake's. "We like you guys. You're good hunters but the demon told us, Dean. It said Sam was the one to let Lucifer back in-"

"And you believed it?" He barked out a harsh laugh and couldn't look at Sam as he continued, "You believed a fucking demon over other hunters?"

"It-"

"It lied!" He inched closer, looking as calm as he could. "Sam didn't do anything, Jake. C'mon, look at him. He's a geek, he's my little brother, he's not the kind of guy who'd end the goddamn world, is he?"

Jake visibly wavered. "But the demon-"

His words were cut off by the thump of fist on bone and he dropped like a stone, passing out in the dirt a few meters away from his father.

Dean breathed out a sigh of relief, tucking his gun away as Sam got to his feet and rubbed at his sore knuckles from where he'd caught the kid off-guard.

"I-" Sam cleared his throat and the guilt on his face was enough to convince Dean that lying had been the right course of action. Sam's lips quirked up in a small, grateful smile as he murmured honestly, "Thanks."

Dean half-expected to hear something else, some other comment about how both of them wished that Dean's lie had been the truth, but his suspicions about his brother were elevated once again when Sam just brushed the dirt off his jeans and turned to the Impala with the easy suggestion, "Let's go."

 **+++**

Dean dreams of demons.

He's in any one of the cheap motels they've stayed in over the years, the worn carpet feeling thin under his boots as he walks down a corridor lined with doors. The cries and screams get louder with every step and reach a crescendo when he stops at the end of the hallway, eyes tracing over the metal '52' sign on the door and wondering whose fingerprints are pressed into the blood there.

There's screaming from inside, pain and ecstasy and desperation, and Dean's body moves of its own accord when he pushes the door open with two fingers and steps inside.

The air's hot and humid. It fills his lungs on every breath and makes him feel like he's moving in water as he walks further into the whirl of sweat and sex and sulfur that engulfs the motel room.

Demons are everywhere, nameless, faceless entities writhing and moaning against every surface they can find with their mouths open wide and their eyelids fluttering delicately over empty blackness. They don't touch him as he approaches the bed and shift away from his feet like beetles backing off from the light.

It's only when he reaches the bed - white sheet, yellow blankets - that the congealed mass of demons starts to settle into a recognizable shape, and he watches, hypnotized, and takes in the familiar parts of the figures intertwined on the bed.

He sees Lilith's torso, bare and slim as she arches up with a joyful cry.

He sees the precise curl of Alastair's long fingers when he tightens his hungry grip.

He sees the hitch in Meg's throat when she tosses her head back with a groan.

He sees Azazel, with liquid eyes and his father's face, laughing with twisted satisfaction.

It feels like the world tilts, nothing changing but Dean's perception as he blinks and refocuses on his altered surroundings. The cries of the demons go a note higher, becoming shrieks of terror rather than of enjoyment, and their groans drop lower to a note that signals agony instead of pleasure.

Dean looks again, now seeing Lilith's torso gaping open from her ribs to her kidneys, Alastair's hand a bloody stump with his fingers snapped and removed, Meg's throat slit deep enough to see a glint of spine amid the strands of red, and Azazel's face - his father's face - slack and still and silent.

The room is dripping, the scent of blood clinging to Dean's skin and the humidity now leaving the taste of iron in his throat. Around him, the bodies are cooling and as the last of them shudder out their remaining death throes, his eyes track over to the one source of movement in the slaughterhouse the motel room has become.

A couple is entwined on the bed, the man sitting and the woman straddling his lap. Her back is to Dean and her dark hair is spilling over her shoulders and hanging loose down her bare back.

Beneath her hair, blood is trickling down her spine.

He watches it run over her tailbone, sickened but entranced as it slides over the curve of her ass to drip onto the bedding beneath, more spots on an already soaked blanket.

She falls backward and, like the others, goes still.

Dean blinks at the stab wound in Ruby's chest and then turns his attention to Sam.

Sam, who is looking at him from the bed, covered with the blood of every demon in the room and holding Ruby's knife in his hand.

"Dean!"

Sam smiles at him, bright and hopeful, like a kid who just wants to make his big brother proud.

"I did what you wanted, Dean," he tells him as blood runs into his dimples. The knife's in his hand and he holds it out like it's an A grade on a homework assignment. "I didn't use my powers."

+++

Dean seriously wished spirits would pick better places to haunt.

He appreciated their need to lurk in the shadows to attack unsuspecting passer-bys but there were shadows in Walmart, dammit. Strip-joints, distilleries, and liquor stores all had their fair share of shadows too but time and time again, spirits chose basements, caves, woods, and various abandoned buildings to haunt, and judging by the sounds his EMF meter was making when he waved it over the stairs of the old mansion he was currently investigating, today would be no different.

He and Sam had arrived in Soda Springs, Idaho earlier that week and so far there had been no shortage of spirits terrorizing the town's three thousand inhabitants. They'd yet to find anyone or anything responsible for summoning the ghosts and so were working on the assumption that it was an apocalyptic side-effect which needed to be defeated slowly but surely.

That was how he found himself venturing down a darkened staircase in search of a spirit in a condemned house on the south side of town while his brother handled a haunted wine cellar on the north side.

The sound of his boots on the stairs was loud in the quiet of the empty house. Shotgun raised, Dean ducked down, scanning the basement with his flashlight as he continued on down, seeing shelves and some stacked furniture but no ghost.

Nerves wound their way through his body, the ordinary hunt anticipation mixed with the growing fear over the last few weeks that one day he'd come face to face with Lucifer when he was least expecting it. Licking his lips, he tried to focus on the contents of the basement instead of the increasing rapidity of his breaths and the thunk of boot on wood that was filling the confined space.

Swinging the flashlight around, he craned his neck to check behind the stairs but was caught off guard when the noise came from below rather than behind.

The wooden plank under his feet gave way and Dean let out a string of curses as he lost his balance, falling sideways into the rail and scraping his leg on the broken wood. His flashlight skittered away across the concrete floor, rolling to a stop against the pile of furniture in the far corner.

"Fuck!"

He hissed out a sigh and winced when he pulled his foot back out of the splintered stair. Gritting his teeth, he pushed himself to his feet but froze when the basement door slammed shut above him, eliminating almost all the light in the room. Readying his gun, Dean braced himself against the post at the bottom of the stairs and squinted into the shadows.

The spirit remained hidden and Dean was left with the dilemma of whether to stay put and wait for the spook's debut or to risk an attack and go to retrieve his flashlight.

He was never one to hang back and it didn't take him long to start moving across the room to grab the flashlight.

He was on the floor on seconds and when something solid collided with the side of his head, it also didn't take him long to realize that he'd made the wrong choice.

 **+++**

"You sure about this, Dad?"

Feeling the world settle into place inside his head, Dean kept as still as possible, playing dead while eavesdropping on whoever had taken a two-by-four to his temple.

"We're sure, kid."

The man's voice was familiar and Dean racked his sluggish brain for the relevant memory.  
"His brother's his weakness. Going through him's the only way to get to the younger one-"

"And Sam needs to die," another voice interrupted and Dean slumped further forward in the chair he was tied to at the realization that at least two of the men in the room with him were Mike and Jake Wilkes, the father and son hunting duo they'd met in Kansas.

It was a safe bet that the other pair of hunters, Stan and Rob Shepard, were involved too when he heard a fourth, younger voice pipe up with the question, "Is this one evil too?"

One of his usual retorts sat on his tongue but his self-restraint proved to be pointless when the second voice, which Dean guessed belonged to Stan, asked snidely, "Well? You gonna answer for yourself, Dean?"

A generous amount of water was thrown in his face before he could process the change in his situation and he spluttered, exhaling hard to blow the water out of his nose.

It took a long moment for his vision to clear while pain sparked through his head but when his eyes finally focused, his jaw tightened at the sight of the dimly lit basement room. The entrance was blocked with furniture and if Dean hadn't been inside it, it would have taken him a while to realize it was there at all. The hunters stood in a loose circle around him, safely outside the black lines of the Devil's Trap which had been scrawled on the concrete floor but with salt, holy water, and various weapons held in their hands.

They stared at him coldly and Dean pasted on his usual front of bravado to say, "Hate to break it to you, guys, but if you're looking to take out a demon, you're gonna need to actually find one first."

Mike stepped forward, booted feet crossing over the line of the circle as he said with a cruel smirk, "We plan to. But first? We need to make sure your brother hasn't infected you too."

"Infected?" Dean raised his eyebrows in disbelief. "Look, Chuckles, I-"

His words became a helpless gargle when Mike grabbed his chin, forcing his head back and wrenching his jaw open before he took a full flask of holy water from his son and emptied it into Dean's open mouth.

Dean choked, struggling desperately against the ropes which bound his limbs to the chair and trying to close his mouth, to do something, anything, to stop the constant flow of water. It felt like he was drowning, his aching head unable to cope with this new assault, and he sagged forward when Mike let him go, coughing up water and gasping for breath.

Amid the sound of his own breathing, he heard Jake murmur his father's name and looked up to hear him ask, confused, "Does this mean he's not a demon? If holy water doesn't work..."

"He could still be a shapeshifter," Stan said gruffly. "Or a revenant. Or some other hellbeast his brother made him into."

He moved closer, bringing his face closer to Dean's and tilting his chin up with a silver knife. "What are you, boy? Tell the truth and you'll save us some time."

The man's breath smelt of beer and garlic. Knowing that whatever answer he gave wouldn't be enough, he shook the water off his face and glared up at Stan with the sarcastic retort, "I'm a leprechaun."

The punch to the face was expected but still painful.

Swallowing back a hiss of pain, Dean met his eyes again and tried not to let anything show on his face when Stan promised, "We're gonna have a talk with you about that brother of yours, boy." The silver knife nicked his jaw and he murmured, his voice grim, "But we've got a few more tests to run before we do."

 **+++**

The salt stung his cut lip when he spat out another mouthful.

The hunters were still surrounding him but, Dean noted with relief, they seemed to have run out of tests to conduct. They backed off, conferring with whispered words while he sagged against the wooden chair and braced himself for whatever would be coming next. The room smelt of smoke and herbs, residue from rituals designed to remove some imaginary evil from him, and his body was damp with holy water tinged pink from cuts given by silver knives.

Wanting to gain some control, Dean lifted his head and asked with faked nonchalance, "You guys want some pointers? 'Cause if you're looking to get me to fail at something, try the SAT. It'll work a lot quicker than holy water."

He was ready for another backhand - he'd received enough of them in the last hour - and so was surprised when Stan moved away from the group, something close to pity on his face as he said honestly, "We're not trying to hurt you, son."

"Could've fooled me," Dean spat back. "Was sticking me with knives just a mistake then? You mean to use the blunt end instead of the sharp, pointy one?"

"We needed to make sure your brother hadn't infected you with his pollution."

"Pollution?" Dean bristled, tugging yet again on the ropes that held him. "There's nothing wrong with Sam."

"You really still believe that?" Behind Stan, Mike stepped forward, a gun in his hands and a serious look in his eyes. "Your brother's not what he used to be, Dean. He raised Lucifer; he brought on the apocalypse-"

"Oh, come on!" Dean interrupted, lying with confidence, "This is Sammy we're talking about. No way he's going to go do something like that; he's still a goddamn hunter!"

"We know it's the truth," Rob chimed in from behind his father. "We know what he did."

Letting out a breath through his teeth, Dean replied coldly, "Even if he did - and I'm not sayin' that's true - he's not like that anymore. I've been with him for two months since Lucifer got out and he's like any other hunter. We're helping people, we're killing demons, we're-"

"Causing demonic omens wherever you go?" Mike crouched in front of him. "We checked you boys out. Every town you've been to, even places where you didn't hunt demons, have had demonic signs in the past two months. Your brother's a demon, kid. He needs putting down like one."

"No." Dean shook his head, drops of holy water sprinkling onto the Devil's Trap. "No, he can't be a demon."

"He-"

"We've got protection," Dean continued firmly. "Both of us, we've got tattoos." He nodded to his chest and did his best not to struggle when Mike pulled his shirt down to check. "They keep us from getting possessed. And I've seen Sammy's and it's still intact; there's no way a demon's getting up in there without breaking that."

"Lucifer could."

Dean's head snapped over to Jake who shrugged nervously and repeated, "Lucifer could get past it. Isn't he meant to be all-powerful or an angel or something? I can't see a tattoo being able to keep him out."

A muttering arose amongst the others and Dean spoke over them, ignoring the doubt that was seeping into his mind, "No! Look, I'd know if I had the fuckin' Devil in the passenger seat, okay? It's not Sam. He's not possessed."

"Then it's his nature," Jake said again, his words calling back echoes of Zachariah's pronouncement. "It doesn't need to get in because it's already inside him. He's evil."

"He's not evil! He's my brother, he-"

"He needs to be stopped, Dean." Stan looked almost sad as he promised, "Once this is over, we can let you go. We can get you help, take you to Bobby Singer's, give you the chance to start a new life, but we can't let that monster live."

Jaw clenched, Dean lifted his chin defiantly. "I'm not telling you where he is. You can use as many damn knives as you want, I'm not helping you kill my brother."

Stan smiled ruefully. "You already are, Dean. You think we don't know what Sam's weakness is? He's going to be looking for you right now; all we need to do is sit tight, and wait for him to come to us."

Dean grinned, lips curving up in an actual smile for the first time. "Sam's not going to walk into a trap like this, dude."

Stan opened his mouth to respond but was cut off by a noise from the floor above, and Dean's smile vanished at Sam's concerned shout, "Dean?"

 **+++**

Dean couldn't decide whether the world was going too fast or too slow.

It felt like everything was moving quicker than he could process when his yell of "Sam, it's a trap!" was smothered by a sweaty palm over his mouth. The group of hunters grabbed their guns, taking up fighting stances near the pile of furniture which blocked the only entrance to the room, while Stan shoved a dirty, salt-covered rag in Dean's mouth to keep him quiet and to free up his hands to hold another gun on Sam.

However, after that burst of activity, the world's pace seemed to slow.

Mouth dry and stuffed full, Dean sat helplessly in his chair and waited. His mind replayed the similar situation nearly three years earlier and teased him with the memory of the explosions and the bone-deep terror for Sam's well-being.

The hunters shifted anxiously, glances being tossed from father to son to friend to reinforcement, and Dean knew all four of them were holding their breaths at the sound of Sam's wary footsteps on the stairs.

The floorboards creaked as he descended and then everything went quiet when he reached the concrete of the basement floor.

Silence stretched on, thick and fraught as eyes and guns glinted in the darkness of the rundown room, and although Dean knew his heart was pounding, it felt like a lifetime between each heartbeat.

He was hurtled back to full speed when a loud crash and the crackle of gunfire filled the basement.

The pile of furniture was still standing and it took a moment for Dean to realize that the noise had come from the thin wall to his right, which now had a large gap where Sam had kicked a wooden beam through it. Sam himself was standing amid the rubble and, hefting his shotgun in the air, fired two rounds into Rob and Stan's chests, sending the men crashing back to the floor, unconscious.

The smell was that of rock salt mixed with gunpowder rather than metal buckshot pushed out by the same explosive, and Dean's earlier defense of Sam felt vindicated when his brother slammed the butt of his gun into Jake's head, knocking him out but stopping short of killing him.

With three of the men out cold across the Devil's Trap and the wall splintered and broken behind him, Dean found himself breathing a little easier as Sam advanced on the last man standing. His lips were drawn in a tight line and Dean shivered at the look in his eyes as he kicked the gun from Mike's hands before tossing his own shotgun to the floor and pulling the pistol from the back of his jeans.

"We told you to leave us alone, Mike," he warned dangerously and Dean's heart rate picked up again when Sam raised the gun to the scared but unrepentant Mike.

His plea to stop was muffled by the gag and he fought to spit the salty cloth out of his mouth as Sam slammed Mike against the wall, pushing the muzzle of the gun under his chin. "You kill hunters now, Mike? We let you and your son go, and you hunt my brother?"

"We weren't hunting your brother," Mike gasped out and Dean shook his head to get free of the gag as he continued boldly, "We were trying to help him. You're a monster; you need to be stopped before you hurt him or anyone else."

When Dean was free enough to shout, his words came out over the sound of the safety being clicked off.

"No!"

Sam hesitated and Dean's skin prickled with unease at the fact that, of the two of them, he was the one who had to make this argument. "He's human, Sam. He's a dick but he's human. We can't- We shouldn't kill him."

Sam didn't protest the use of the plural when he was the one holding the gun while Dean was still tied to the chair, and both Dean and Mike exhaled in relief when Sam lowered the weapon.  
Again, the world went from slow to fast when Sam then cracked him across the face with it but it settled back to a calmer rhythm when Mike dropped to the floor and Sam stepped over him to untie Dean from the chair.

The look on Sam's face was that of a concerned little brother as he checked Dean's injuries, fired the usual set of questions at him, pulled him to his feet and supported him as they headed up the stairs.

That look, the reminder of the pre-apocalypse, pre-Ruby, pre-Hell, pre-Azazel Sammy, was enough to keep Dean buoyed and hopeful while Sam went back inside to cuff the four hunters to whatever he could find before driving the two of them back to the motel to recuperate.

His optimism and the steady pace of the world lasted until he fell asleep.

 **+++**

As soon as Dean's eyes closed, Stan's taunts about his brother came creeping to the forefront of his mind.

He saw the hunters in his dreams, each of them lying on the floor of the basement he and Sam had escaped from. They were tied in place, handcuffs or rope holding them down to heavy furniture or slats of wood in the wall and temporarily preventing them from continuing their useless crusade against Sam.

It felt like his body was absent when he watched Sam step through the broken wall, now displaying cool confidence rather than powerful desperation.

Sam's lips moved but Dean couldn't hear the words that were coming out as his brother strolled towards the hunters before stopping and smirking at his captives.

The scene played out like a macabre silent film as Jake and Rob's necks were snapped with a flick of Sam's wrist.

Dean couldn't shout in protest, couldn't move to help, and couldn't hear the furious threats that he knew the boys' fathers were hurling in Sam's direction.

Part of him was relieved that their grief was short-lived when Sam turned his attention to them.

Sam towered over Mike, his tall, lean shadow dwarfing the cowering man, and the darkness was almost enough to block out the brutality of the man's death.

Sam raised his hand and pushed once at the air.

Under the demonic power of his short, sharp shove, Mike's head slammed against a metal support and Dean could only watch as the man's skull crumpled inwards like the head of a porcelain doll, leaving him shattered and still.

Stan was next. Sam crossed over to him with a smile, crouching in front of him and saying something which again slipped under Dean's level of hearing.

He saw Stan raise his chin, a reflection of Dean's earlier defiant stance in the face of presumed death, but unlike earlier, Sam was not here as a savior.

It was with sick fascination that he watched Sam rest a hand on Stan's chest and slide his fingers inside as though the man's body was offering no more resistance than water. He saw Stan screaming, mouth open and eyes clenched shut in pain, but couldn't do anything to stop Sam from drawing his reddened hand out of his chest with unnatural ease, Stan's warm, bloody heart caged in his long fingers.

Stan's body stilled, face frozen in horror as he too faded into death.

Sam stood, his shadow instantly imposing in the room now full of corpses rather than enemies, and let the heart drop from his hand to the floor.

It dropped with a wet plop, the first sound in a silent dream, and Dean looked up to lock gazes with Sam, green eyes meeting black.

Dean woke with a shallow gasp, lungs feeling tight until he sat up and sucked in a few rapid breaths.

Blinking away the images of his dreams, he remained on edge and jumped when the bathroom door opened.

He relaxed a little when Sam walked out, dressed in his usual clothes and with eyes the same hazel color as always, but he couldn't entirely stifle the unease that arose at the sight of Sam's freshly washed hands.

 **+++**

The Impala rolled to a stop outside the house and Dean nearly rolled his eyes at the ridiculousness of his suspicions.

It had just been a dream. He knew that - he'd had dozens of dreams the past few weeks and none of them had come true - and yet he couldn't explain why he'd felt the urge to sneak out of their motel room in the middle of the night, sliding out of Sam's protective embrace, and retrace his route to the house he'd been held captive in.

He didn't even know what he was going to say to the hunters once he reached the bottom of the stairs; "Hey, just checking you're not dead" didn't seem like an appropriate remark to make to people who wanted his brother dead and whom he dreamed his brother had killed.

The stock of his gun felt heavy in his sweat-slick hand as he edged around to the gap in the wall that Sam had created. Following in his brother's footsteps, Dean stepped inside and froze.

Staring at the room, he blinked rapidly in an attempt to clear away the images from his dream but found he was only left with full-color reality. The room smelt of blood from where it pooled on the uneven floor and Dean's mind replayed the dream, now adding the men's screams at high volume as he took in their corpses, which were now all too real.

Jake and Rob lay half-upright against the wall, their heads twisting downward like lolling poppies as though their skulls had been too heavy for their fragile, snapped necks.

Across the room, Mike's brain was splattered on the opposite wall, a metal pole sitting in the inward curve of his caved-in skull while cooling blood was still trickling onto the concrete.

Stan was in the middle of the road, eyes and mouth wide open in a horrified expression Dean had seen directed at Sam as he'd ripped the man's heart out of his chest. The organ in question lay discarded along one of the lines of the Devil's Trap and a sick part of Dean wondered if he'd find Sam's fingerprints pressed into the bloodied muscle if he looked closely enough.

"Oh, God."

Dean spun around at the voice from behind him.

His mouth fell open when he saw Sam standing by the wall, eyes wide in (faked?) horror as he took in the bodies scattered around the room.

"They're dead?" Sam asked, sounded as stunned as Dean had felt a moment earlier.

Frowning, Dean backed off, away from the corpses and, indirectly, away from Sam as he said, voice carefully controlled, "They were like this when I got here two minutes ago." He swallowed, throat dry and scratchy. "You wouldn't know anything about that, would you, Sammy?"

"No..." Sam walked in a slow circle, still looking utterly dismayed by the deaths of the hunters. "They were okay when we left."

The gun was even heavier and Dean let it swing against his side. "You sure about that?"

Dean's body felt numb when Sam turned to smile at him, teeth flashing white and eyes flashing fully black for the first time he could remember seeing. "Would I lie to you?"

 **+++**

The air filling Dean's lungs suddenly felt thinner.

Watching Sam like he was a scorpion, Dean shifted his weight backward but kept his face neutral, not wanting to spook his brother (or whatever was in his brother) into attacking.

No matter how quickly Dean blinked, Sam's eyes stayed black as he took a step closer. He gave him a half-smile but the usual brightness of his face was distorted by the cold glint in his dark eyes. "We should get out of here before the cops come."

Dean swallowed, unnerved by Sam's apparent indifference to the change that had come over him. Unable to lift his gun and actively oppose his brother, he settled for a weak question, "You okay, Sammy?"

Sam glanced behind him at the dead men before saying uncertainly, "Um, yeah. Not like I was that attached to them, y'know?"

Dean wanted to throw up. Waiting for his mind to come up with a plan, any plan, he hoped the burst of inspiration didn't spark in his eyes when his gaze fell on the Devil's Trap on the floor.

"The handcuffs!"

Sam frowned, brows knitting together. "The handcuffs?"

Dean cleared his throat, fear instinctively spiking at the sight of a displeased demon. "We should get the handcuffs," he suggested. "I mean, they're dead now and it's not like we need to keep them here anymore. It'll save us having to buy more cuffs." He faked a smile. "Those things are fucking expensive, dude."

It was hard to tell whether Sam looked convinced without being able to read his eyes but Dean exhaled in subtle relief when Sam shrugged and turned to the men across the room. "Sure."

He walked into the Devil's Trap, crossing over to where Rob and Jake were cuffed to a metal support. Dean held his breath as Sam's boots passed over the symbols painted on the ground and something constricted inside him when Sam stepped out of the trap and reached to snap the cuffs off the wrists of the corpses.

When he headed back over to Dean, his eyes were back to hazel and his smile was half-hearted but non-threatening as he asked again, "Ready to get out of here?"

"Yep." Thinking he'd been seeing things, Dean relaxed a little and slid his gun to rest in the back of his jeans before saying, "Yeah, let's go."

His expression froze when blackness flickered down over Sam's eyes yet again for a brief instant and as Sam led the way out of the room, Dean glanced back over his shoulder at the Devil's Trap, hoping for concrete proof that his imagination was playing tricks on him and that there was nothing demonic in his brother.

However, the concrete of the basement floor provided a different kind of proof and Dean's gaze landed on the crack that ran through the protective circle of the Devil's Trap, rendering it useless.

When he joined Sam in the Impala, Dean felt like his brain had shut down and when he started the engine and steered the Impala into the darkness ahead, he had no idea where he was driving to.

 **+++**

It was three days before Dean made his move.

The time was mostly spent in the Impala, sitting side by side behind the sun-warmed dashboard as Colorado and Utah slid past the windows. Hunts were scarce and the time spent anywhere but with each other was scarcer; Dean knew he was looking for demonic signs in Sam rather than in the local newspapers.

He watched Sam at every opportunity.

He watched him on the phone, when he was driving, when he ducked into gas stations to grab their next round of snacks. On the second night, he even watched Sam sleep, curled up uncomfortably in the backseat while Dean leaned against the driver's door and traced the design on the flask of holy water with the pad of his finger, wondering if it would do any good.

Every waking moment, he watched but when he saw Sam stride across the gas station forecourts, or duck around a corner to use the bathroom, or smile innocently at a store clerk, Dean honestly didn't know what he'd do if Sam carried out any one of the acts he'd been imagining. His brain ran through all possible scenarios, from Sam killing everyone in the joint to an angel striking him down in a burst of white light, but Dean didn't know how to cope with any of them.

Instead he ignored one little thing at a time, filing away the darkness that sometimes flooded Sam's eyes, the occasional harsh remarks he overheard in Sam's conversations, and the burnt fingerprints Sam had left on a bathroom door in eastern Nevada as things to be examined at a later date.

However, as the hours ticked away, minutes and seconds left behind in the dust on the road, it became harder to ignore. He began to expect black eyes instead of hazel, flares of anger instead of tired grouchiness, and he was struggling to adapt to seeing the dead bodies of the hunters behind his eyelids instead of merciful blankness.

When they stopped at a mountain cabin on the California border, Dean decided he couldn't wait any longer.

Thankful for a secluded location where the traps could be disguised but also where bystanders wouldn't be able to interfere, he sent Sam off to the nearest 7/11 for beer while he readied the room.

Drawing Devil's Traps was second nature to him now but his hand trembled as he scrawled the symbols on the floor underneath his brother's bed.

The protective circle sat in the center of the room, mostly hidden by a rug which Dean hoped would fool Sam long enough for him to become trapped. With the exception of the front door, all doors and windows were lined as usual and he took the added precaution of etching extra sigils into the wood to prevent any demonic entry that way. He stashed weapons around the one-room cabin and checked his supply of holy water, rope, and duct tape as well as scanning over the familiar Latin of the exorcism ritual.

Deciding that he was as ready as he would ever be, Dean knocked back a generous gulp of whiskey, which did nothing to calm his nerves, and settled in a chair to wait for Sam.

 **+++**

"Hey, they only had some crappy local brand so I got lots of it."

Dean stayed in his chair as Sam tossed the key for the cabin onto the table, dumping the brown grocery bag beside it and shrugging off his jacket.

After days of keeping up the pretence of normalcy, Dean had run out of smalltalk and couldn't offer any kind of greeting to Sam when his mind was still going over his preparations and the impending confrontation. A gun was tucked down the back of his jeans; the weight was reassuring as he shifted and felt the body-warmed metal nudge his tailbone.

He stared at the brown bag on the table, watching the dark patches of dampness grow as the cool bottles stayed in contact with the paper, and hating how pathetically normal the situation appeared on the surface.

"Dean?"

From Sam's tone, it wasn't the first time he'd said his name and Dean shook himself out of his stupor and looked towards him.

"I said I picked up the local paper," Sam said. "Flicked through it while I was getting gas but everything looks pretty normal around here. Wherever Lucifer is, he's not hanging out in some mountain village."

Dean's laugh was short and harsh, cut off before it could develop into the uncontrollable hysteria he knew was festering in his gut.

He was almost relieved when Sam seemed oblivious, eyebrows lowering over hazel-black-hazel eyes as he asked, "What's so funny?"

Sam was two steps away from the circle of the trap. Dean kept his eyes on his face.

"Nothing," he replied honestly. "Nothing's funny, Sammy. Not anymore."

"You get drunk without me or something?" Sam took a single step closer, lines of confusion etched into his forehead. "Did something happen?" Dean picked up a note of childish excitement in his voice as his eyes flashed black at the question, "Did someone die?"

That excitement carried him the necessary step forward, plus two more, and Dean pushed himself to his feet.

With other demons, he liked this part. He liked to make a show of it, let them know that despite their powers, despite everything that made them stronger than humans, he was in control now, but when it was his own brother standing in the trap, Dean couldn't summon the enthusiasm for gloating.

Wordlessly, he kicked up the corner of the rug to expose the Devil's Trap and raised his gun, a pointless defense against the shocked anger written on Sam's face.

 **+++**

"What the hell, Dean?"

Sam's eyebrows were raised in disbelief and Dean swallowed at the look of hurt surprise in his very human eyes. However, when Sam glanced down at the trap and then back up to Dean, he sounded more mocking than offended when he asked, "You think I'm a demon?"

"I don't think it, Sam; I've seen it. You know I have."

Sam didn't move from the center of the circle, hands by his side and posture more relaxed than it should have been. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Don't lie to me!" Dean was taken aback at the volume of his own shout and he lowered his gun, shaking his head at Sam. "Don't lie to me, Sam." He smiled sadly, exhausted but on edge at the same time. "Are you even Sam anymore? 'Cause you know how much I hate to listen to anything Zachariah tells me but I'm running out of options here, man."

"I'm me," Sam murmured, dragging the front of his shirt down to show off his tattoo. "I've always been me."

Dean shook his head, not wanting the angels to be right. "Could be Lucifer," he stated. "That tattoo only keeps out demons, not angels."

"Angels need permission," Sam reminded him calmly. "You really think I wouldn't kill myself before I let Lucifer use me as a vessel?"

"I don't know, Sam, okay?" Again, the volume of Dean's voice rose higher than he intended and he exhaled slowly, doing a quick mental inventory of the restraints and weapons around the room before picking up a flask of holy water and saying, "I don't know what's wrong with you. It can't be a low-level demon because I've seen you perform exorcisms over the past few weeks, and if it's something that needs a binding link to stay inside, then I don't know where the hell they put it because I've seen every goddamn inch of you."

"So what now?" Sam asked, still staying at a level of calm that set Dean's teeth on edge. "You going to torture me? Slice me up like those guys did to you back in Soda Springs?"

Since Dean's plans consisted of either "Stop Sam" or "Save Sam" depending on the circumstances, he could only offer a shake of his head. "M'not going to hurt you but I'm not gonna let you hurt people either."

Sam smiled, eyes bright and clear as he said softly, "That's what you said to me when we were kids. I thought sparring meant fighting and I didn't want to spar with you in case you knocked me out or something. You told me that you wouldn't hurt me and that you'd teach me the right way to spar so that I wouldn't hurt you or Dad." His smile faded. "When did you start worrying about me hurting 'people' instead of hurting you?"

Dean felt a warm rush of nostalgia at what passed as a pleasant memory from their unconventional childhood, but shook it off quickly. Coldness took its place and he ordered, "Stop it."

"Stop what?" Sam's voice was soothing, like Dean was a wild animal needing to be tamed. "Stop talking to you like you're my brother? Stop acting like I'm not evil? I'm not," he stressed, eyes pleading for sympathy. "I know I fucked up in Ilchester - I fucked up more than the words 'fucked up' can convey - but I'm not evil. I've been with you this whole time, haven't I? I've been hunting and helping people and-"

"And causing demonic omens everywhere?" Dean's defenses went back up with the sharp accusation. "Or it is just coincidence that every town we've visited has had storms, crop failures, power cuts, the full demonic welcome package? I know we've found other demons on the hunt but even when it was just spirits and witches, you've been lighting up the fucking grid."

"It wasn't me," Sam said quickly. "I don't know what's been following us but I didn't cause those omens!"

"Like you didn't go to town on those demons back in Lakeline?"

"They were demons! They'd slaughtered a whole town of people-"

"So you go all Mr Blonde on them?" Dean sucked in a breath, mind recalling the body ridden with bullet holes but mostly of the simple wrongness of his little brother inflicting them. "You put a hand over its mouth to stop it smoking out and then shot out its knees and elbows. Hell, I'm good with squeezing demons for information but there was nothing we needed to know from it!"

"I was angry."

Sam sounded surprisingly contrite and Dean halted his tirade to listen to his explanation. "Angry?"

"When they held me down," Sam began quietly, "they were saying things to me. Things about the apocalypse, about Ruby, about what happened to you in Hell, and I was angry, okay? I just- I wanted to hurt them."

Dean faltered at that, but his hesitation was for nothing when Sam's eyes rolled to black and he added with determination, "And I did hurt them."

Caught off-guard, Dean took a step back but felt a headache start to throb at his temples when Sam took a step forward, caring, sensitive mask back in place as he asked, "Hey, you okay?"

"Stop." He raised the gun, knowing he wasn't going to shoot but wanting the reassurance of a weapon. "If that's Lucifer in there, stop fucking around and tell me what the hell you want."

"I'm not Lucifer," Sam reiterated, earnest and sincere. "I don't know what's going on but I'm not evil, I swear."

"Could've fooled me," Dean spat. "You think I don't notice when your fucking eyes turn black?"

"What?" Sam looked panicked. "My eyes have been turning black?"

"Funny," he said sarcastically. "What's next, you going to tell me that you didn't kill those hunters back in Idaho?"

"The hunters? Why would you think-"

"Because you were there, Sam! I find the bodies and you show up a second later looking all surprised? I didn't buy the innocent act when you were a kid and I'm sure as hell not going to buy it now."

"I stole a car; I followed you; I-"

"Bullshit." His anger rose, directed at the thing that was wearing Sam's face or was in Sam's blood. "You killed them. I dreamed about it - I thought I was going crazy - but then I got there and it happened exactly as I saw it, down to the last fucking drop of blood."

"Wait, you dreamed about this?" Sam looked concerned but again, his pupils expanded to fill his eyes with black as he stepped closer, voice tense and urgent, "Why didn't you tell me?"

Feeling cornered, Dean re-aimed the gun, barrel pointed squarely at Sam's chest as he said coldly, "Because you killed them, Sammy. Because for all I know, Dad, Uriel, and fuckin' Zachariah are right and you're turning into a monster who needs to be stopped."

"Dean, I'm n-"

"Shut up," he ordered, unable to deal with any more attacks on his shaky resolve. "Just shut up and drink this."

Sam caught the flask in one hand. Dean was fully prepared to reissue the instruction but Sam uncapped it without any protest and put it to his lips.

Dean hoped for coughing. He waited for Sam to choke, for the entity inside him to react to the influx of holy water, and for smoke to come rising out of his mouth like he was on fire.

The seconds ticked by and nothing happened.

There was no choking, no reaction, no smoke, just his beetle-eyed brother swallowing down the last of the holy water with ease.

Disappointment stinging in his chest, Dean watched the flask drop to the floor.

He barely looked up in time to see his brother step over the line of the Devil's Trap, eyes still black and mouth fixed in a grim line as his fist collided with Dean's face.

+++

When his mind pulled pictures out of the blackness, they were all of Sam.

In his dream, Dean found himself standing in the middle of the Devil's Trap. The symbols around him were scrawled in thick red crayon, childish etchings on the wooden floor which nevertheless served their purpose of holding him in place.

He watched as Sam stepped up to the edge of the circle and stared straight through him.

Dean called out to him, his lips forming Sam's name as easily as they parted to take a breath, but no sound came out.

Muttering a voiceless curse, he resorted to waving, raising his hand in an attempt to attract Sam's attention.

Sam's attention was on other matters and Dean's eyes widened when his brother turned to smile at their mother, who stood next to him on one of the five points of the crayoned star.

Mary ran a hand through Sam's hair, a motherly fondness in her eyes which sparked a phantom pain in Dean's gut at the memory of giving up that same affection. She was shorter than Sam now, her body appearing delicate and fragile under the span of Sam's hands as he stepped closer, but she smiled the same smile Dean remembered from bedtime in Lawrence, cradled in his mother's arms while she told him stories of angels.

She moved up onto her tiptoes, white nightdress brushing her calves as she leaned to kiss Sam softly on the cheek.

The kiss never landed when Sam walked straight through her, causing her body to crumble into scattered ashes which sprinkled over the lines on the floor.

Their father was next.

No matter how loud Dean shouted with his useless mouth, calling for Sam to come to him instead of into John's embrace, Sam didn't stray from his path. Like Mary, John smiled at his son and Dean stopped yelling, trying to savor the dream-fragments of his Dad ever looking that happy.

He felt the loss tug at his chest when Sam approached with open arms, ducked his head to let John kiss his forehead, and then passed through his ashes without a backward glance.

Dean turned with him as Sam walked between the points of the star with slow strides.

He couldn't see what was at the next point, couldn't look directly at it without it ebbing out into the corners of his vision but as tendrils of smoke snaked around Sam, Dean recognized the familiar presence of Azazel.

Sam tilted his head up, eyes flashing yellow and lips parting in a breathy gasp as the smoke swirled around him in a motion that couldn't have been anything other than possessive. Sam's pace slowed and Dean wasn't sure whether, if he could speak, he'd be yelling for Sam to walk to him or just to keep walking to somewhere.

There was nothing but relief in Dean's chest this time when Sam did keep walking, reducing the demon to a sulfuric dust which mingled with the ashes of Sam's parents along the red lines of the trap.

Sam moved along his path, still not looking at Dean, and Dean was more offended than surprised when he saw Ruby waiting for Sam. Familiar resentment bubbled up inside him like acid and he shouted noiselessly into the room as he was forced to relive the betrayal again when Sam walked right into her arms.

Unlike Azazel, Ruby looked human, the same petite brunette dressed in underwear and a tanktop that Dean had initially written off as one of Sam's one night stands.

The evidence of his mistake burned hot and bright against his cheeks when Ruby craned her neck, arching up to kiss Sam with cloaking darkness in her big brown eyes.

Her lips didn't make contact either since Sam pushed on forward, but Dean did a double-take when she didn't crumble into dust as expected, but collapsed with a dull, fleshy thump.

Sam walked on but Dean's gaze stayed on Ruby, who still looked human even as blood trickled from the stab wound in her gut, filling the crayon lines with a darker, thicker red and soaking into the dust of those who came before.

Distracted by the flow of blood, Dean caught himself before his mind slipped away to other things and looked back over to Sam, only to find he was too late.

Sam stood on the final point of the star, facing Dean for the first time with a wide, ecstatic smile on his face. More smoke surrounded him, heavier and denser than Azazel's presence as it began to blanket Sam from his feet upwards. It was dark, darker than Dean could possibly find a word for, like a gaping black hole in the room and in the world that was gradually swallowing his brother whole and delighting in its meal.

Sam's feet and legs were hidden now and the writhing mass slid upwards, riding up his torso in undulating waves that made Dean feel sick just looking at them. He couldn't speak, couldn't move, could barely see as Lucifer, Hell, or whatever this was, claimed Sam for its own, pouring out until Sam was gone and all Dean was left with was nothingness.

Dean jerked away, eyelids flying open to prove to himself that the world outside of his head was still there.

The light, dim as it was, hurt on first contact. He hovered between the dark of nightmares and the too-bright glare of reality for a long minute until he blinked himself fully awake.  
His cheek throbbed in time with his slowly increasing heartbeat and after poking gingerly at the inside of his cheek with his tongue, he wondered whether Sam had broken his cheekbone with that punch.

Finding himself strapped tightly to a high-backed chair, it didn't take long for Dean to wonder instead about the more important question of whether he'd survive long enough to care about a broken cheekbone.

"It's not broken."

Sam's voice came from somewhere to his right and Dean fought against his restraints as well as the rising nausea to lean his head back to see Sam standing by the wall, a piece of chalk held between his fingers.

"Your face," he clarified calmly, black eyes standing out against the smudge of chalk on his forehead. "I checked and I don't think it's broken."

"Thanks, House," Dean retorted sarcastically, forcing some bravery through the fog of pain and dreams that still clouded his head.

Dropping his head to a more comfortable angle, he frowned at the sight of the chalk symbols which Sam had drawn on the walls and which made the cabin essentially angel-proof. His frown deepened when he saw that an extra line of salt had been added along the bottom of the locked door and that Sam had gone over the lines of the failed Devil's Trap Dean was in the middle of, making the room inaccessible to interference from below as well as on high.

Sam's feet thudded on the floor before Dean could draw any conclusions. When Sam moved in front of him, he fell back on what he knew and, raising his chin, asked with as much boldness as possible, "What the hell are you?"

 **+++**

Dean flinched back when Sam crouched beside him.

Sam's long fingers skimmed the ropes binding Dean's wrists and ankles to the chair. The bonds wouldn't give when Dean tugged on them but he struggled anyway, disoriented from the blow to the head and fired by the instinctive, primal fear of the creature in front of him with the empty eyes.

"What do you want?" he spat, trying to writhe away as Sam's hand moved to the ropes running across his chest.

Sam slipped his fingers underneath the ropes, tugging it experimentally and causing Dean to gasp at the pressure across his ribs. "Get the hell off me."

"Easy," Sam soothed and Dean wasn't sure whether to relax or stay tense when he dropped his hand back away from him. "Just making sure you can breathe okay."

He knew backchat may not have been the best idea but it was better than sitting passively like a lamb waiting to be slaughtered. "I'd breathe a lot easier if I wasn't tied to a fucking chair."

Sam smirked at that, and even though Dean couldn't see his pupils, from the movement of his head he knew Sam was looking over his body appraisingly.

"What're you doing?" he asked, fear rising.

"Shh," Sam hushed, sounding almost like his brother rather than whatever demon was inside him. "M'not going to hurt you."

"Yeah? 'Cause I remember you knocking me out a few minutes ago." He smiled bitterly. "What was that, a hallucination?"

Smiling, Sam ducked his head and Dean caught the murmur, "Okay, so I might hurt you a little."

He raised his head again and pushed himself to a standing position, instantly making Dean feel more vulnerable as he stared up at Sam's shadowed face. The tremor of vulnerability only grew stronger when Sam leaned in, bracing his hands on the arms of the chair and bringing his face inches from Dean's own.

His breath was warm on his cheek and Dean turned his head to the side in disgust, ignoring the mockery of intimacy Sam seemed set on continuing.

"Look at me, Dean," Sam ordered quietly, repeating louder when Dean didn't move. "Look at me."

Dean's cheek stayed pressed to the high-backed chair, his eyes closed and his breathing shallow. "Fuck you."

Sam's fingers slid into place on his jaw but instead of coaxing him into a usual kiss of reassurance or teasing or simple want, his grip tightened as he forced Dean's head to the front.

Dean's cowardice didn't extend much further. Pulling in a breath through his nose, he opened his eyes to look at his brother head on. His gaze tracked over the familiar planes of Sam's face, seeing the stubble along his jaw, the smudge of chalk half-covered by his disheveled hair, and the circles under his eyes that were almost as dark as the otherworldly blackness under his eyelids.

"Dean." His gaze shifted to Sam's lips, watching his mouth rather than his eyes as he asked seriously, "Dean, what are you seeing?"

 **+++**

Taken aback by the question, Dean's eyes darted up to Sam's, looking for concern but finding nothing but black.

"What?" he ground out, mouth opening as wide as Sam's hand would let him. "What d'you mean 'what am I seeing'?"

"What do you see?" Sam repeated. "Right now. When you're looking at me, what's looking back at you?"

Dean was ready to answer, ready to give a detailed description of what he knew about the hell-beast that had infected his brother, but was instead left blinking in confusion when Sam's eyes melted back to hazel.

"Dean? Dean!" Sam prompted, jerking his jaw upwards a little. His gaze was full of concern now and the foundations of Dean's convictions started to tremble. "Dean, what is it?"

"You're a demon," he answered with as much confidence as he could muster. "Don't pretend you're fucking innocent all of a sudden. Just because your eyes aren't black doesn't mean you're not still possessed."

"Dean, I'm not possessed." Releasing his chin, Sam gestured to the design on the floor. "Did you not see me walk out of the trap before?"

"Then you're Lucifer, or there's something fucked up in your blood, or you're possessed by something else we've never seen before," Dean retorted boldly. "Because right now, you're not my brother."

"I am," Sam asserted, leaning in again and speaking slowly. "It's me, Dean, okay? It's just me."

"No-"

"Dean!" Sam snapped, sounding more like their father than Dean wanted to acknowledge. Unlike their father, however, Sam calmed before continuing, "I need you to listen to me, all right? Watch my lips and listen to what I'm saying and please believe me."

He didn't have a lot of choice but to listen when Sam was in his face, but he nodded shortly.

Sam actually looked relieved and Dean watched him lick his lips nervously before he began to talk, "You've got a demon attached to you-"

"Bullshit." He pulled against the ropes around his wrist, struggling in Sam's shadow. "You're the one with all the new violent tendencies and, oh yeah, fucking black eyes."

"Listen to me," Sam repeated, not still losing his cool. "Whatever you've been seeing, it wasn't real. The thing that's attached to you, I think it's an imago."

"What the-"

"There are mentions of it in literature going back thousands of years. It's a shade, kind of like a shadow, only instead of following you, it fits over you like a body-glove. That's why your tattoo's not doing anything to keep it out; it's trying to control you from the outside rather than the inside."

Dean swallowed, still suspicious but growing hopeful at the possibility that Sam wasn't the one in trouble. "What's it do?"

"Bobby said it varies," Sam admitted. "But from what you've told me, it sounds like it's filtering your perception, making it look like my eyes are black or making you dream about me doing things that never happened."

"So you didn't kill those hunters?" Dean asked, cloaking optimism with skepticism.

"No," Sam promised. "It could've been the imago or it could've been any one of the spirits in that town, but it wasn't me. All the signs and omens we've been tracking were probably caused by the imago too - it's powerful enough for that - but since it's not a demon, the usual exorcism rituals haven't had any effect on it."

"This thing, did it make me see you shooting up that demon in Lakeline?" he inquired cautiously. "Can it alter that much?"

Sam looked down guiltily, shifting on his feet as he admitted, "I was telling you the truth earlier - the demon was talking shit and I got angry. The imago can't do that much. It can control dreams and it can alter smaller things like eye color, but it can't show people doing things they're not. That's why I need you to watch my lips when I speak; Bobby said they can affect hearing so if I start looking like a badly dubbed foreign movie, it's not me speaking."

Dean managed a half-hearted crack, "C'mon, man, I don't watch foreign movies."

Sam smiled wryly, faint amusement transforming back into worry as he asked, "So you believe me about the imago? You get that I'm not evil?"

Dean watched Sam's eyes flicker back to demonic and his answer caught in his throat.

 **+++**

Sam's eyes rolled from black to white to normal and Dean couldn't fully shake off his fears.

"If you're telling me the truth," he hedged, "what do we do now? How do we waste this thing?"

Sam stepped back, pushing his hair off his forehead and easing back into geek mode even as Dean saw (imagined?) black smoke swirling behind him. "There's an incantation. It'll make the imago detach itself from you so we can exorcise it like a regular demon."

"There's a 'but' coming, isn't there?"

Sam raised his eyebrows in a gesture of agreement and continued, still hopeful, "For the incantation to work, you need to help it to leave. It's twisted around you right now, all tangled up in your thoughts and memories like seaweed, and if I try the ritual now, it's not going to leave easy."

"When you say 'not going to leave easy'..."

"It'll rip your brain out," Sam confessed and if it hadn't been for the grim expression on his face, Dean would've assumed he was grinning at the prospect, given his enthusiastic tone of voice.

He had to fill in the blanks with his mind, replacing the taunting, demonic Sam in front of him with what he thought the real Sam was actually doing. "How do I not lose my mind then, Sammy?"

The name didn't match the man in front of him and Dean focused on Sam's lips rather than his now-yellow eyes as he delivered the response that Dean didn't want to hear, "You gotta trust me."

"You're looking like a demon, Sam. I'm not about to trust you with my life right now." The sickly yellow eyes blinked at him and he couldn't stop himself from adding, "I'm not you. I don't trust fuckin' demons."

Sam flinched and Dean felt like fire was licking over his skin at the flare of white-hot anger that seemed to emanate from his brother.

Apologies were hard at the best of times but impossible when faced with the countenance of a demon and he stayed quiet as Sam dealt with the jibe and pressed on with as much calmness as he could manage, "You need to try to trust me, okay? You need to believe me and think of things you know are true while I do this. They can be stuff from when we were kids, parts of the Impala's engine, the last porno you watched, whatever, just as long as you don't give in to the thoughts the imago's put in your head." He paused for breath, hands clenching nervously at his side as he asked, almost pleading, "Can you do that?"

The smoke behind Sam faded, leaving the tall, powerful outline of his brother against the backdrop of the cabin.

Taking a deep breath, Dean looked into the shifting yellow of Sam's eyes and nodded once.

 **+++**

When Dean was ten, their father took them camping.

It hadn't been camping in the traditional sense; they hadn't taken a picnic or hiked up to a good viewpoint just to take in the beauty of the park like normal families did. They'd been on a hunt for a werewolf in California and when Dad tracked it into Yosemite, Dean and Sam had taken three days off school to help their father stay inconspicuous among the tourists and fellow campers.

Now, bound to a chair a few hundred miles north of there, Dean focused all his attention on the uncorrupted memories of that pseudo-vacation while in the background, Sam kept chanting.

He remembered Sammy's excitement at being away for a few days; apparently it was acceptable to the logic of a studious six-year-old to miss school in favor of hands-on learning in the great outdoors. That excitement hadn't dimmed when they'd arrived, and Dean knew he'd been just as keen as Sammy to learn how to track, how to find food in the forest, how to sharpen and use branches as makeshift spears, and how to make effective shelters.

The only difference had been that Dean had known what the shelters were intended to keep out.

He shivered at the memory of the werewolf's growl outside their fortified tent on the last night and his mind slipped back to the present for a second. Sam kept chanting and Dean concentrated on the past instead of the demon that was supposedly invading his mind.

On the third night, they'd made a fire at the edge of their campsite and Dean had sat up late with Sam, eating the foil dinners which had been the pinnacle of the Winchesters' cooking abilities and watching the sun slip down behind the trees to bathe the woods in a cooling glow. Sammy's hand had been clasped tight in Dean's as they'd run to the shelter Dad had helped them build, Sammy giggling happily as Dean furnished him with the cover story he'd been given.

The werewolf had come that night.

While Dad had headed out with a gun, Dean had huddled in his sleeping bag, one hand stroking through Sammy's messy hair as his little brother slumbered peacefully with his earplugs firmly in place. He'd heard the noises of the fight get closer to the tent, growls and misfired shots that echoed in the night and after making sure Sammy was safe and asleep, he'd crouched up to unzip the tent and peer over the wall of the fort.

The wall was higher than he remembered and reality slipped back in as Sam kept chanting.

The sight of their father wrestling with a ragged, bearded man and wrenching his preternaturally strong jaws away from his neck was filtered through a tinted lens. Dean blinked and the redness at the corners of his vision started to creep inward.

Out of sight, Sam kept chanting.

His father and the werewolf coalesced into blurry shapes as the fog over his eyes thickened and the more Dean stared, the heavier it got. The safety of his childhood fort was gone and he was left with the knowledge that the walls of the mountain cabin were too far away to protect him from the rapidly corporealizing entity before his eyes.

Sam kept chanting.

The red mist swirled with streaks of crimson, cherry, and burgundy, too fast to keep track of but not slow enough to keep Dean from growing nauseated at the sight. He wasn't sure whether his eyes were even open when the entity became solid enough to block his vision entirely and he froze at the silence that fell over the room when Sam's chanting stopped.

Each breath felt like a risk. Dean stayed as still as possible, waiting for the usual exorcism ritual to start up and get rid of the creature for good, but pulled against the ropes on his wrists when the imago started to shift with more of a purpose.

A large blot appeared, the red darkening to the color of blood, and Dean's breath hitched as he called out into the silence, "Sam?"

The blood-stained smoke rolled and grew, and Dean's panic kicked up another notch when he found that he couldn't close his eyelids. The imago stung his eyes, acrid and burning, and he fought to blink the pain away. "Sam?"

Blinking was impossible and his lips parted in a gasp when the smoke began to seep in around his eyeballs. It got stronger, gripping his eyes in a claw-like hold, and Dean screamed when it started to pull.

"Sam!"

 **+++**

If Sam was doing anything to help him, Dean couldn't hear it.

The imago's hold tightened and the tendrils of smoke pushed on the delicate skin around his eyes, opening them wide in preparation even as Dean strained to close them in self-defence.

He fought for freedom, legs kicking out uselessly and ropes digging painfully into his wrists as he tried in vain to pull his hands free and do something to protect his eyes. There was no sign of Sam, no words or shouts or chants and nothing that could be seen around the smoke blocking his vision, and Dean yelled again, "Sam!"

Pain ripped through him, radiating out from his eyes as the imago held his eyeballs in an impossibly painful grip. Agony sparked down his optic nerves and his whole head felt like it was on fire when the smoke seemed to scorch his head from the inside out, clenching and building the strength necessary to rip his eyes from his face.

Desperate to stop it any way he could, Dean shook his head in an attempt to dislodge the smoke and was momentarily successful when it dissipated from his vision.

It returned in full force a second later but Dean sucked in a breath before it did, the cool air a contrast to the burning in his head. He saw Sam in front of him, saying something hurried and inaudible, and as cries for help issued from his throat again, Dean honestly hoped Sam was helping his current situation rather than causing it.

It felt like fingers were scrabbling behind his eyeballs. Tears ran down Dean's cheeks, a useless protection against too great of an attack, and he tugged harder against the ropes, wanting to do something, anything, to get away from the attacking imago.

He had a brief moment of respite when his struggles sent him toppling backward as the chair he was tied to clattered to the floor.

This time, his hearing was cleared with the movement and his tears nearly became genuine rather than involuntary when he heard Sam's voice, urgent but steady as he murmured the familiar words of their usual exorcism.

Dean's throat was hoarse from the screaming he hadn't known he'd been doing and he gasped out a plea, "Sam, hurry-"

His shouts of pain picked up again when the imago descended with new force, all its energy concentrated on his eyes, and he could barely pick out Sam's shouts over the debilitating agony lancing through his head. The pain increased to the point where Dean could barely scream anymore, and his chest grew tight as he struggled to get oxygen into his lungs.

When everything went black, Dean didn't even know whether his eyes were still in their sockets.

 **+++**

Dean's head was still pounding when his eyes fluttered open but as the ceiling of the cabin came into focus, he was pretty sure he'd never seen anything better in his life.

"Dean?" Sam's voice was a thunderclap in his ears and he groaned. "Hey, Dean, you with me?"

Blinking the eyes that were very much still in his head, Dean realized he was untied but flat on his back when Sam's head came looming into view, his face free of any demonic features. "S'm?"

His throat hurt, voice coming out as a growl after his earlier screaming had worn it down, but his failed attempt at speech was soothed by the relieved smile on Sam's face. "Yeah. You good?"

Dazed, Dean propped himself up on his elbows and waited until his head had stopped spinning. Swiping at what he assumed were tears on his cheek, he re-evaluated when he saw smears of diluted blood on the back of his hand. "Guess so," he croaked. "S'it gone?"

"Exorcised," Sam confirmed. His voice raised a note, betraying the nerves lurking from earlier. "Can you see okay? Were your dreams normal?"

"I don't remember if I was dreamin'," Dean admitted, some of the gravel in his voice being worn away as he kept speaking, "Everything looks normal right now, no red mist or anything."

Sam smirked, concern lingering in his eyes but something of his usual demeanor back as he informed him, "You know, the phrase 'seeing red' actually came from the imago."

Dean chuckled and then grimaced at the pain in his head. "Man, screw holy water; I shoulda tested you with geek trivia to check you weren't possessed."

Sam's echo of his chuckle was just that, weaker and less convincing, and Dean's amusement shifted into a grim smile as he murmured, "You weren't possessed."

It was more of a statement than a question and a smile stretched across Sam's worry-lined face, like a hand smoothing down wrinkled clothes. "Did you figure that out before or after I stopped you from getting your eyes torn out?"

Dean shrugged, quietly enjoying the feel of Sam's arm as a reassuring weight across his shoulders. "During?"

Sam's smile was dim and Dean defended, "I wasn't sure, Sam. I'm sorry for not trusting you but this is the apocalypse, dude. You released Lucifer, that thing was fucking with what I was seeing, and I had Zachariah sitting on my shoulder telling me you were evil and needed to be stopped. Dick." His jaw tightened in anger at the outright lies he'd been fed by Zachariah but he relaxed into a half-shrug when the anger made his head hurt too much. "It was hard to trust you."

Sam nodded, slow and serious, and matched his tone to his expression. "You trust me now?"

"I trust that you're you," he answered, forcing sincerity despite the throbbing at his temples. Further debate circled his mind but the ache was over-riding and he settled for the dismissal, "The rest of it doesn't matter right now."

"Uh-huh." Sam's voice was teasing but more importantly it was content. "And how much of that answer is you just wanting to sleep instead of arguing with me?"

"'Bout fifteen percent." Dean grinned tiredly and reached up to clap Sam on the shoulder. His aim wasn't perfect and he settled for a clumsy pat to Sam's cheek instead. "We're good, Sam. Couple of hours sleep and we'll have Lucifer running for the hills." He frowned. "Or Hell. Or wherever Satan runs when he gets his ass handed to him."

"Okay, tiger." It was clear Sam was humoring him but the top half of Dean's head was way too sore for him to care. "Can you make it to the bed on your own or do you need some help?"

"C'n make it," Dean slurred.

Despite his claims, he was nonetheless stunned when he actually made it to his feet to stagger the short distance to the double bed in the corner of the room. He crashed down and, without bothering to change his clothes, shuffled up to the pillows and let the bed push him down the start of the slide into sleep.

As Sam settled beside him, he belatedly realized that his brother may have actually supported his weight the whole time. However, the bed was too comfortable and the presence of Sam's entirely undemonic body against his own was too sleep-inducing for him to make the effort of a protest.

+++

Dean dreamed.

He dreamed of the murky water of the Florida swamps, of the leaking pipe in their apartment in Maine in '92, and of the splash of holy water rising off a body as smoke.

He dreamed of the fires of the Pit, of the hungry flames on a November night in Kansas, and of the heat of foil dinners cooked in the embers.

He dreamed of the mythical angels of his bedtime stories, of Zachariah, Uriel, and Castiel, and of the tinsel halo he set on his brother's head for the kindergarten nativity play.

He dreamed of his painstaking tuition under Alastair's steady hand, of Ruby's body writhing against Sam's, and of Azazel flashing his father's teeth in a cold smile.

He dreamed of his mother dealing for his father, his father dealing for him, him dealing for Sammy, and Sam turning his energy to ending the world when there were no more hands to be dealt.

Like hundreds of nights before, he was stirred to wakefulness when images of black, white, yellow, and hazel eyes skimmed too close to the surface of his mind, blinking him back to reality.

He rubbed at his eyes, still feeling the residual ache pulsing through his head.

However, unlike the past few weeks, his dreams didn't linger, didn't loiter behind his eyelids to remind him of dangers and failings with every blink. Instead they disintegrated into nothing, swept out of his consciousness like ashes in the wind, and he shifted position with a sleepy lack of coordination, barely noticing the absence of the weight of the imago.

One of Sam's hands was on his back and Dean eased himself into the space in his brother's arms, now rid of any concerns about the nature of the man next to him. He yawned, heard his stomach grumble, and let his eyes fall shut again, wearily thankful for the bed, the warded cabin, and Sam's warm embrace.

For the rest of the night at least, Dean had pleasant dreams.

 

 

 **End**

 


End file.
